So, I’m building some apps for myself, which I use it with my Groq API key, which works cool. But I just want to put it out there, you know, and tell others to use it also. But getting their own Groq API key will be like a barrier for them. And also I don’t want to run a server and manage it and be responsible for being a proxy between Groq and the users of my app. So, I thought it would be nice to have without any user account or API key, any authentication, some very limited free tier so that anybody can just use it. Something like for example Google or YouTube or ChatGPT right now, you can use them without an account. Once the user starts to use the app, then they will be fine with getting an API key and stuff. Once they are interested enough, it’s not a barrier anymore. But for a new user, if we ask them to do it, it’s a big barrier, they’ll likely go away. You can still rate limit them with maybe IP address or some browser fingerprint or some other feature like maybe I could just code a random GUID (self id) in my app, some kind of fingerprint just to know the rate limit and you can use that to prevent spam and enforce rate limit.
I think this would be really cool for app developers because their users have no barrier at all. They can just use the app and developers don’t have to maintain servers (particularly useful if decentralized apps/agents). I think this can better the user onboarding.
And from your side, I don’t think it’s much cost at all, right? Even if you give like 10% of what the current free tire limit is giving or even 1%, right? Because it’s already very, very generous, the free tire limit. So even if you give like only 1% of it to the non-API key users, it would still be a very good start and you have nothing to lose really. But everything to gain by the potential user base that are sticking to the apps that are using groq.
Another way of implementing this would be like for example app developers can come here and create an API key for that app which like all the users are currently like sharing when they are like initially using. So you know that, like your service will know that it’s coming from my apps from different users. Yeah, so in their testing phase and eventually we can, I would ask them to use their own API key.